Avi Blizovsky
Akhtatan - remains of a city that existed in Egypt for only a short time
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/egypt011202.html
Most of the Egyptians in ancient Egypt lived on the poverty line while very few people in the priest-king class enjoyed extreme wealth. Children had to earn their living from a young age and two out of three adults on average in the family had to work.
At least this was the situation in the 14th century BC, according to the Egyptian mathematician Abdul Magad of Zagzig University, in an article published in the journal Nature.
The number of residential units of different sizes in the city of Akhtatan show that the distribution of wealth was very polarized in ancient Egypt, much more so than in most societies today.
The area of the house, says Abdul Magid, is a reasonable estimate of the owner's wealth in a society that did not know money, like in ancient Egypt. Most of the houses were one-story, made of mud bricks and had an area of about 60 square meters. However, one or two houses covered an area seven times larger.
Akhtatan provides a good glimpse into the distribution of wealth, says Abdul Magid. According to him, the width of the city was about 2 kilometers and therefore it was a large city, but it also existed for a short time and therefore was not subject to changes over the generations.
King Ahtanton founded the city with the aim of introducing the inhabitants to a new religion in which there is one god known as Ethan. He wanted to found a new culture, and therefore he moved the capital from Thebes - now Luxor - to the new city.
When Akhenaten died, the new religion was abandoned, Thebes returned to being the paradise and Akhetaten returned to the hands of the desert. It was only inhabited for another twenty to thirty years before it was buried in the sand.
In all urban societies, the number of people with a certain decade proportion decreases as the proportion increases. The degree of inequality can be derived from the degrees of this reduction. The higher the level, the poorer the people and there are also slightly more rich people.
In 1897 the Italian sociologist Vifelardo Pareto argued that all modern cultures show a similar level of wealth distribution. He drew a graph that showed an inverse relationship between the level of wealth and its distribution in Italy at the time Bretto estimated (and this law still exists today) that 20 percent of the population owns 80 percent of the wealth.
In Akhtatan there was a separate division, but it was very narrow. There was no middle class there to better distribute the wealth, and therefore only a few enjoyed it.
Archaeologists have been studying Akhetatan since 1891 when the Egypt Research Fund in London began funding the research. Today there is a city called Tel El Amarna on the same site.
For information in Nature
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~386920289~~~158&SiteName=hayadan
